Worst Science Fiction TV Season Finale?

[mabfan]

I'm looking for suggestions for the worst science fiction television season finale ever. (Not series finale, but season finale.) Any thoughts?

Comments

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

The first one that comes to mind (after looking it up to confirm that it was indeed the seasone finale) was ST:TNG "Shades of Gray" (the clip show they did to squeeze out another episode during the writers' strike).

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

The season 1 ender of Earth:Final Conflict, which was meant to set up all the 'clever' changes that the suits at Fox had decided were needed to set up the show.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Quantum Leap.

Confusing as hell and a final text screen that effectively killed the series for all time.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Duh.

RTFQ, Ray.

[xochitl42.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that one or several of the season enders for the last 3-4 seasons of the X-Files qualify as flea-bitten tripe. I'm assuming that the X-Files qualify as science fiction TV series?

[delkytlar.livejournal.com]

I'd have to go with the Season 3(?) finale for BSG, where they revealed four of the final five Cylons. That nonsense with "All Along The Watchtower" ruined the show for me, and I never went back.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I hadn't remembered that one. Good suggestion. Thanks!

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I never watched this show, but I take it the direction they wanted to take the show in did not appeal to the fans?

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

We really do need to understand why Sam Beckett was willing to abandon his wife and never return home.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, X-Files would qualify.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Never? You missed all the controversy of the final season!

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

ISTR some of the changes were:
1) Kill the main character - he's too cerebral, not pretty enough, and not a proper action oriented character
2) Simplify the aliens to make them more unambiguously villains
3) More emphasis on action/adventure less on continuity arcs

There were others, but those come to mind.

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

Just curious as to which episode that was. (I'm not good at titles. I tend to say things like 'you know the one with that guy? And he had that thing?')

Also - LOL icon.

[suzvoy.livejournal.com]

I just have to throw in the fourth season finale of Enterprise. Okay, so it was the series finale, too, but - SUCKAGE. SUCK SUCK SUCK. As far as I know, everyone from every part of the fandom likes to forget that it exists.

[bluetyson.livejournal.com]

But still has some good memories, and missed many bad to terrible episodes though!

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

It was the one that was 95% flashbacks of previous episodes (hung on a couple minutes of frame story about Riker getting poisoned by an alien plant).

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

I'm just assuming that all advanced civilizations eventually produce Jimi Hendrix.

[sorek.livejournal.com]

Good One!

Worse, the episode would have worked much better after season 3 when you had the borg to flashback and relive over and over again. Tasha Yar dying and Riker getting sucked into the the "skin of evil" is supposed to be, at the time, the most frightening thing for Riker, which is what let's them destroy the parasite in "Shades of Grey". Unfortunately, it's not that scary for the viewers. Now play various clips from Best of Both Worlds and Q Who and you might have had a better episode.

Short Version, season one was so bad, they couldn't find interesting clips to use!

[kuroshii.livejournal.com]

"effectively," nothing. they knew it was the series finale when they did that!

as for why sam was willing to never go back to his wife...i don't think it was a continuous decision of never returning: i think that it was the sacrifice he made in order to reuinite al with beth, i.e. telling beth that al was alive and that he was going to come home, so she wouldn't remarry. with al happily married to beth all those years, he wouldn't have had all the doomed romances in between. so that scene with al & sam meeting in the series premiere (al fighting with the soda machine) would never have happened. so the paradox is set up of the QL project never having "succeeded," (that is to say, gone delightfully awry and setting the stage for sam to be an active participant in personal histories)...yet the sam we know is out there, putting right what once went wrong. so he's sortof in limbo, but doing good for the world one person's life--with attendant ripple-effects--at a time.

or at least, that was my take on it at the time.

::shrug::

[swashbucklr]

That seems like an achievement that you'd get with a sufficiently high tech level on Civilization IV.

[delkytlar.livejournal.com]

No I didn't. My Director and my Associate spent most Mondays debating each episode outside my door. I just didn't care.

[delkytlar.livejournal.com]

Jimi Hendrix would be the William Hung of any significantly advanced civilization. He's certainly not much higher in my estimation in our own civilization.

(Ray Feist tried to convince me to give the show another chance by saying, "Well, if you don't like Hendrix, just look at it as being Dylan's song, and all is well." That would work, except that it was the concept of any 20th Century song being used that destroyed my belief in the BSG universe.)

[delkytlar.livejournal.com]

It was a perfectly fine revisionist history finale for a revisionist history series. And I think a little alt-hist Trek can be fun from time-to-time. If I didn't, I wouldn't be headed to the theater in two weeks.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

I know it's also a series finale, but the last episode of BSG, especially the last half hour or so, both had the characters being amazingly stupid (the anti-tech message) and ruined the series for me (pick any of the many deus ex machinas).

[amysisson.livejournal.com]

This is the one I was going to bring up too. I don't think it mattered when/where it appeared in the series overall; it was just freakin' horrible.

[glishara.livejournal.com]

Heck, yeah. That was the worst episode of TNG ever, and that it came as a season finale was atrocious planning.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Was there any part of Enterprise that wasn't lame?

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

In the fourth season, they finally started doing what they should have done from the beginning...and then they cancelled the show.

And yeah, the series finale, by turning the whole story into a lesson for Riker, showed something of a lack of respect for the characters of Enterprise.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

The ending of BSG was very puzzling, with a lot of controversy, but I'm not sure it's as bad as the TNG second season finale referenced above.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

What? They turned out to be a holodeck scenario? That's even more lame than I thought.

You've asked for lame season finales, but will you take suggestions for season beginnings? If so, TV series War of the Worlds was set in the present, but, come the second season, the cast was now living in a low-rent Bladerunner environment.

[sorek.livejournal.com]

Actually I liked that switch. I always felt bad for the aliens in season one. They were working under such a big handicap. The "good guys" had fancy toys, and the full backing of the government and might of the military. The aliens had "Darkman" issues where their human looking body disintegrated after a relatively short time. I missed how they explained the switch. I assumed the aliens got into the government and cut the good guys funding. Did they ever explain the switch within the story?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Not only that, but Season One's aliens had to contend with John Colicos. As for the setting's switch, the only explanation was in the opening credits where the narrator breathlessly explains that he doesn't know what happened. It's probably the same memory glitch that had everybody forget about 1953's invasion, and of our trying to stop it by dropping an atomic bomb in Los Angeles's outskirts. Ah, what Philip K Dick would have done with that idea...

[ianrandalstrock.livejournal.com]

She wasn't his wife when the series began. After the episode where he drove her to Washington meet her father at the Watergate, she was able to love, and then they married in "the past". But Sam also didn't remember her while he was leaping through time, in order to be able to do what he had to do.

I have to disagree, though, with this concept. That was a very effective ending for the series, and actually did leave the door open to a follow-on series if they ever wanted (or at least a follow-on series of novels). But I'm guessing that, other than we hard-core fans, it never had a big enough following for anyone to consider following it up. They say anthology shows don't draw, and I guess they're right (grumble grumble).

[ianrandalstrock.livejournal.com]

Okay, I get it. I'm like the only person who actually liked that version of "All Along the Watchtower". It's sufficiently creepy, yet up-tempo, that it resonates with me.

[cellio]

The end of the fourth season of Andromeda produced the biggest TV "WTF?" I've uttered in many years.

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

As I understood it at the time -- when they finally got to Earth I, it was supposedly *this* Earth, *our* Earth, and one of the signs of that was that they had actually, literally, been playing Bob Dylan. Then the writers just forgot all about that so that they could get us to Earth II.

Which, I'll admit, did not stop me from asking "Bob Pooping Dylan???" when the second character gave the second line.